Featured News

Bureau County’s first-ever conservation expo, organized by the Illinois Land Improvement Contractors Association (ILICA), the Wetlands Initiative (TWI), and other partners, will be held on August 4–6, 2015, at Thacker Farms outside of Ohio, Illinois.

The Wetlands Initiative is committed to public fishing at our Sue and Wes Dixon Waterfowl Refuge at Hennepin & Hopper Lakes in north-central Illinois starting this year. The organization is currently working with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR) on the specifics, including a starting date.

Through a major ongoing partnership with the National Forest Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service, the Wetlands Initiative is doing significant restoration work this year within a new area at the Forest Service’s Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie called the South Prairie Creek Outwash Plain.

In spring 2014, a team of three students from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Engineering helped design a farm-based wetland to capture nutrient runoff for TWI’s project in the Big Bureau Creek Watershed in north-central Illinois. The students turned the opportunity into their senior design project, while the partnership allowed TWI to complete a needed initial engineering design at no cost.

The Wetlands Initiative will begin a new project at the Dixon Waterfowl Refuge in 2014 that will restore rare oak savanna habitat and more than double the existing trail system, allowing visitors to access and explore the interior of the 3.5-square-mile site for the first time.

A grant from Coca-Cola, together with match funding from the National Forest Foundation (NFF), is helping TWI expand its restoration work at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie to a large new parcel known as the South Prairie Creek Outwash Plain.

With no traces remaining of any invasive carp, numbers of migratory waterfowl visiting the Wetlands Initiative's Dixon Waterfowl Refuge at Hennepin & Hopper Lakes this fall are the highest ever recorded, and populations of reintroduced game and native fish are thriving.

In July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the Gulf of Mexico's toxic "dead zone" measures 5,840 square miles this year—about the size of Connecticut. But many small wetlands placed far upstream can help solve this very large problem.